We found a gorgeous apartment near the
Georges-Vanier métro station, and apparently all the
paperwork is now in order, so yay. We'll probably move in
early June. It's enormous, and beautiful, and I can't wait
to move in. I will miss Toronto dearly, but commuting like
this sucks in no small way.

My ISP kicks ass.
They're going to solve my MTU-DSL problems for me, at some
cost to themselves. I am supremely pleased that I
can get DSL service from them in Montreal, as well.

typelibs
and the IR are not suitable for comparison. typelibs are an
on-disk storage format for interface information, and the IR
is a service that permits applications to query for such
information. I dimly recall, from our conversation, that
mathieu really objects to IDispatch,
which is the primary (only?) consumer of COM typelib info in
the Microsoft COM world. I agree with his stance: IDispatch
is abhorrent, if only because it's stub-based. =)

It then follows that you can build an IR service,
which uses typelibs to store interface data. We do that,
basically, in XPCOM, and we call it nsIInterfaceInfoManager.
In fact, the implementation of nsIInterfaceInfoManager
doesn't even grovel in typelibs directly: it's isolated from
the typelib files by the libxpt
layer.

A little while back, graydon and I discussed wedging
an xptcall-like-thing into ORBit, and blizzard thinks that it wouldn't
be too hard to write a CORBA-connecting analogue to XPConnect. We
already use the xptcall stuff for proxying
between threads, so there's some non-JS marshalling
stuff in there to work from. How hard can IIOP be?

I sent the document out today, and it was well received.
We're starting down our open source path, though I can't
really say more until we get our plans sorted out in
detail. It's going to be a heck of a lot of fun. We're
going to need great
people to help manage it, of course, so I get to go play
recruiter for another few weeks.

Hey, Tyla has arrived.

Sent my O'Reilly thing in yesterday, too. Or did I?
It's not in my sent folder, and there's a core file in my
home directory that claims to have been ``netscape'' -- not
the panel or gmc, yay! -- so I'm not so sure it got out. I
was in a bit of a rush on the way out last night, so I don't
clearly recall shutting down. I'll be pissed if I have to
rewrite it, mainly because I should have just engaged my
brain and done it in emacs first. First, though, I'll pray
and mail marcia.

Off to dinner and merriment with zab and Tyla and Jenn and willy. More work later,
possibly.

Today is, so far, a writeoff. Still apparently on PDT, I
slept through my alarm and then only got up when the Bell
guy showed up at 11. Bell guy's visit didn't go well, and
I'm still too utterly pissed off to want to recount the
tale. It's really not his fault, but at times I had
difficulty keeping that clear in my head.

Apparently I have a conference call at 15h00, so I'll
have to take that before I go to Montreal. Which
puts me on the 17h00 plane, which puts me in Montreal at
18h30, which should, hopefully, please, please, please put
me at Globe by
19h30. (Note clever use of Québec-style time
syntax. I'm so bicultural it hurts.)

Then back to the office after dinner, to get some work
done. I've had this document sitting on my disk in jot form
for 5 days now, and it's not doing anyone any good
there.

I still need a hotel, but how hard can that be? As long
as Bell's not involved, it should be right groovy.

Have to submit my talk description for the 2000
O'Reilly Open Source Software Convention today too, or
Mitchell will (rightly) kick my ass. July is shaping up to
be a busy month, what with two weddings and two conference
gigs in the space of the last 15 days.

CFP was fun, at
least the parts I saw of it. Got my business cards at the
party, and they're pretty. Mildly inaccurate, but nothing
fatal -- should only foil the casual caller, since while the
direct number listed is fictional, calling the main number
will eventually get you to me. And do I really want to talk
to a casual caller?

Back from the party
and the Developer
Meeting, both of which were lots of fun. People are
doing cooler stuff with Mozilla than I had imagined. (And
I'm a pretty good imaginer.) I was unpleasantly surprised
to discover that I couldn't use my upgrade certs on the
wacky L-class fare that I had SFO<->YYZ. Even more
unpleasantly surprised than when I realized I needed 2 certs
each way. Coach sucks for long trips, but I got a
bulkhead seat on the way out, and an exit row seat on the
way back. My back has just about stopped aching.

The Hyatt
Regency is a pretty nice hotel, but their ``any
airline'' bonus-miles thing apparently doesn't include my
program of choice, affiliated with
United or not. The Hyatt just
down the road was pretty nice too, according to blizzard, and a little cheaper
to boot.

zab moved to Montreal the other
week. I guess I'll see him tonight, unless I put off my
trip to tomorrow. I'm still on PDT, it
seems, which got me
off to a late start today. Having trouble getting to my
mail right now, though, so maybe I should just hop on a
plane and get onto the
network ASAP. Decisions,
decisions.

Hope we find an apartment as nice as dria's or zab's. I have hope: Ron is
really good.

Came back to discover that I've been getting a fair bit
of fax spam. I should really find out if it's as illegal
here as I think it is. Some of it is coming to the office
voice line, which is just absurd. Are they war
dialing? How do they know that there's a fax machine on
that? Does Bell let them see that it shares a line with the
ident-a-call
for my fax? Mysteries abound.

Bell is still
doing a miserable job of installing the home<->DSLAM
part of my DSL service. My ISP has been supportive, but
their hands are largely tied: when Bell wants to fuck you,
fuck you they will. I should write more about the saga at
some point.

I have not been involved in any ``gender debates'' of
late, but I've been away from home for a while.

Went to Ottawa for the weekend, and that was lots of
fun. he and she and he have good accounts of it, so I
won't bore you.

Started to feel ill at dinner yesterday, so I went home
and lay down. Decided not to go to the
Matrix-on-IMAX-screen thing, even though justin and ajh came all the way
from Ottawa to see it. Then I decided to go anyway, because
it's just sitting still for two hours, right? Right.

Didn't feel much better after I got back, and felt
decidedly worse this morning. Cancelled my hotel
reservation, because I'm not going to Montreal today, no
way, no how.

Back in Toronto, and I Must Do Laundry. Apparently, my
body really missed my bed, because it took to the idea of
back-home sleep like a sonofabitch. 10.5 hours, whee.

Chris and Shona came by to watch X-Files last night.
Not a bad episode, as they go, though Scully's cleavage
made more frequent and vivid appearance than was perhaps
strictly necessary.

I want to buy a Handspring Visor, but
the nasty people at Handspring aren't shipping to Canada
yet. Spring 2000, they say, and I am naive enough to
believe them. I will resist the urge to ring them up and
inform them that today is, in fact, the first day of
spring.

So far, not getting a whole lot done today. Not quite
sure where the time has gone -- some of it to
laptop+VPN+network travails -- but it looks like it'll be a
late night tonight. Or maybe I should just stall until the
nice people at Velocet
set up my DSL on Thursday. (Yay!)

Steph appears to have chosen a dandy time to go
do her modelling thing in Taipei, what with the spirited
rioting and threats from The Least Balanced Nuclear
Power
and all. We're obviously keeping a close eye on that
little hotspot.

In Montreal still (since the 9th, I think). The
original
better-living-through-martini-shakers party crew didn't show
last weekend, but Zach and Jen and Tyla did, and that was
fun. Zach found a place, and it's quite a nice place. Now
Tyla and I have to do the same.

(Yes, Zach is the Smart Person mentioned below.
Progress
on the other one in question continues apace.)

The PR people convinced me to do another
interview,
this time for Upsi
de.
Went pretty well, though Mr. Williams seems to have melded
Ian Goldberg (our Chief Scientist) and myself (Chief
Software Officer) into one "Chief Science Officer". Some
people here are a little frightened by that thought, and I
can't quite understand why.